Those Sirius XM “qualified entity” channels – who wants them?
After two years of kicking the can down the road, the Federal Communications Commission has finally established rules for allocating those “qualified entity” Sirius XM channels. Quick history: back in July of 2008 the FCC approved the merger of Sirius XM satellite radio, but with lots of conditions. One of them was that four percent […]
Radio Guide for the 2010 CMJ Music Marathon
In a matter of hours the CMJ Music Marathon will get underway in New York City. Although it’s expanded from its college radio roots into a larger event with music showcases featuring around 1,000 bands, a film festival, artist-focused panels, and even gaming sessions this year; there is still a noticeable radio presence at the […]
Pandora offers fix for Droid X glitch (it works, too)
The other day I tried to fire up Pandora on my Droid X, and to my dismay, I got dialogue box saying that the feature was experiencing “unexpected technical difficulties.” When I clicked the “OK” button, it came up again. So I wound up force quitting Pandora from the “settings” feature. But to my double […]
82 Best Freeform College Radio Stations
Wow. I never want to do my own list of favorite college radio stations, but the one compiled by Zoomout is pretty impressive. In a lovely map featuring college radio station logos Zoomout gives praise to the top college radio stations in terms of freeform programming and streaming audio quality. The map’s creator Sujay writes: […]
2010 CMJ Music Marathon Preview and College Radio Awards Nominees
Next week the CMJ Music Marathon hits New York City and the surrounding areas from October 19 through 23. The annual college radio/indie music schmooze-fest will include music showcases, panels on the music industry, a special day-long College Day just for college radio DJs, a film festival, Entertainment Business Law Seminar, and a new music […]
Last.fm posts twin word pop band tags
Last.fm staff are a creative and unpredictable bunch. When the online radio service’s interns aren’t categorizing last.fm tunes by age and gender popularity, their database programmers deploy regular expression scripts to dive into the server’s postgreSQL database and dig up every band named with the same word twice. As in “The The,” “Talk Talk,” “Duran […]
Friends of KTRU Hire Law Firm to Protest Sale of Rice University’s College Radio Station
It was announced today that Rice University has finalized its sale of student radio station KTRU to the University of Houston. University of Houston plans to use the FM frequency in order to expand its public radio offerings beyond its current station KUHF (Houston Public Radio). The hope to create a sister station, KUHC, which […]
Pirate Cat in fundraising mode to buy radio license
Pirate Cat radio says that the operation has “two FM stations that it has the option of purchasing,” but it needs $60,000 to do so. Hence a fund-raising drive on the Kickstarter site. The Kickstarter campaign has until October 21 to raise the money. San Francisco’s Pirate Cat has an interesting history. For a while […]
Save KPFA declares victory in KPFA-FM board elections
In what is hopefully the last subscriber/staff board election that Pacifica radio ever has, the Save KPFA slate says it has won the majority of delegate seats on Pacifica station KPFA-FM’s Local Station Board. “I believe that the results here indicate that the listener-members do not want an explicitly sectarian station,” declared Save KPFA’s Mal […]
Want to piss off your radio audience? Talk about P2P file sharing
Man, my student Jacob Margolis got himself into a deep tub of digital hot water the other day over at KPCC-FM public radio in Pasadena, CA. Jacob took my telecommunications history class up at UC Santa Cruz and now he’s an intern down there. His crime? Explaining the mechanics of P2P file downloading on one […]